Entering Hoard Mode: The Love and Lust of Game Collecting

A charming, cute and humorous role-playing game, Earthbound came in an oversized box (it included a strategy guide to help players through its weird world). A low print run and an expansive cult following makes this extremely valuable today. Although Nintendo has released many of its classic titles as downloadable content for Wii, it has skipped this one. Should it ever re-release Earthbound as a download, the price of the original will plummet from the dizzying heights it currently enjoys.

Photo: Cody Pickens

Final Fight Guy was not sold in stores; it was exclusively offered as a rental through Blockbuster Video. When the chain sold off their old stock, this made it out into the world. Finding one with the box and manual, as shown here, is extremely tricky since they were often damaged, destroyed or thrown away.

Photo: Cody Pickens

Nintendo is extremely protective of its popular franchises. One rare slip-up that it made was to allow the electronics maker Phillips to create games based on The Legend of Zelda for CD-i, an early compact disc-based game console. They were terrible, but Zelda fans want them in their collections anyway.

Photo: Cody Pickens

Before Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, there was this Japanese release, which was only given away as a prize in a contest run by Nintendo. I, ah, might have overpaid for this, but I just love Punch-Out!! and had to have it.

Photo: Cody Pickens

My copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga, which I bought in an Electronics Boutique for about $40 brand new. As one of the final releases for the ill-fated Sega Saturn, and an excellent role-playing game, both collectors and players want this four-disc game and are willing to pay upwards of $300 for it today.

Photo: Cody Pickens

Nintendo's Virtual Boy was an early experiment with stereoscopic 3-D visuals -- one that the company abruptly gave up on less than a year after it launched the unloved machine. The final four games released for Virtual Boy in Japan shipped in absurdly low numbers, and are thus in extremely high demand among collectors of oddities. Clockwise from top left: Space Invaders Virtual Collection, Virtual Bowling, SD Gundam Dimension War and Virtual Lab.

Photo: Cody Pickens

Writer Chris Kohler with the loves of his life.

Photo: Cody Pickens

This short feature on game collecting appears in the February 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Check out the tablet edition of this month’s magazine to hear the author speak about a selection of rare games, which also appear in this digital-exclusive photo gallery.

Collecting videogames starts with what you love. You remember your youth—playing Metroid in glorious lo-def—so you buy a secondhand Nintendo and a few of your old favorite games. Then you realize that as a grown-up with a full-time job, you can have all those games that you couldn’t afford as a kid. You hear strings, harps, a choir of angels. But that’s the sound of the rabbit hole opening.

You start buying anything you don’t already own. You never wanted Yo! Noid as a kid—even then you guessed it was terrible—but you no longer care whether the game is actually fun to play. You have a new quest. The original Nintendo Entertainment System had 730 titles; wouldn’t your 12-year-old self flip out if he knew you had all of them?

Soon you’re spending all your time crafting eBay searches (“Double Dragon AND Battletoads NOT Sega Genesis”). And woe betide the collector who wants the original boxes and instructions, which most kids threw away and which can now add hundreds of dollars in market value. Eventually you realize you’re missing only a few games that were made in tiny quantities or pulled from shelves—the same few games other collectors want. So you wind up in frenzied bidding wars where an obscure game like 1987’s Stadium Events can sell for tens of thousands of dollars. Because now it’s not about your love for the games you do have; it’s about your lust for any that you don’t.